network.”
“Whatever. Like I was saying, why not kill two birds with one stone? This trial is what you’re all about! Don’t you see that? A new mother, Hailey, a new mother and her baby. How can you turn your back on a little baby? And get this . . . they’re both dead! Dead, Hailey! Dead, dead, dead!”
“Will you please stop talking about them like that? I don’t like it.”
“Murdered. And the guy’s gonna get away with it. Is that what you want?”
It wasn’t what Hailey Dean wanted at all.
His words kept ringing in her ears as her flight touched down at SAV, the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport. It had taken a lot to get her out of Manhattan, to leave her tiny apartment in the sky, and crowbar her away from her psych patients.
As a friend of the prosecutor, Hailey agreed to fly down and testify, or at least consult for the state, regarding Julie Love Adams’s relationship with her husband and what may have affected Julie’s decision to stay in the marriage. She would also profile the defendant, Todd Adams; specifically, his behavior just before and immediately after the disappearance of Julie. It was all part of the psychology that would prove Julie’s murder.
Criminal profiling, as much of an art as a science, draws on psychology and statistics combined with the profiler’s experience, knowledge, and, frankly, good old intuition. Profiling had been around since London’s Jack the Ripper.
“Behavioral evidence” was one of Hailey’s specialties and had been a marquee element in nearly all of her homicide prosecutions. She could pick apart a killer’s behavior, reactions, and responses, or lack thereof, like no other. Behavioral evidence analysis skyrocketed Hailey to become one of the most successful, and hated, prosecutors in the South . . . possibly the country.
Profiling often dealt with what was known but not spoken. In polite Savannah, the wealthy elite hobnob at the oldest country club in town, and “check in” regularly at offices set up by great-grandparents. The Julie Love Adams case had been one of their most salacious topics since Julie first went missing. But there was never mention nor, of course, understanding of the mind of a killer. No juicy conversations addressed warning signals before or clues left behind. It was all just gossip to get them through another bridge game, garden club, or round of golf.
But behavior like affairs, money problems, alcohol, gambling, domestic abuse . . . none of that would ever be discussed by clusters of ladies at the Savannah Country Club in the quiet carpeted areas off their powder rooms. Pink-faced matrons “glistening” delicately in their morning spin classes would remain silent on the issue, and forget about it coming up in the men’s locker room. No way.
The Adamses were third-generation members of “the Club.” Todd’s father and his grandfather before him had both sat on the board. Hardly a weekend passed without the parents meeting friends for cocktails and dinner there or the whole clan showing up in their Sunday best to man their usual table in the center of the club’s casual dining area near a huge stone fireplace for the predictable fare at Sunday brunch.
For a few weeks after Julie went missing, the Adams continued their regular club visits, but after a while, it was painfully obvious the place was buzzing with gossip about Todd and Julie, so Sunday brunches came to a halt. It was Burger King before 10:30 AM now for the Adamses, a small coffee and folded eggs.
And how they resented it.
Julie Love Adams was murdered, her body weighted down and dumped in deep, swirling, muddy waters. She managed to wash up ashore on Tybee Island along with a chunk of cement block. Her baby ultimately detached from her uterus in the salty ocean water and followed her mommy in the next tide.
The two were buried together in one grave, with Julie Love holding her baby’s remains in her arms inside the coffin.
Of course, the casket was closed because there was nothing but bones, hair, and soft tissue left of Julie. No one within Savannah’s upper crust discussed it openly.
But they would now.
It would be plastered across the airwaves.
Russo tried his best to convince Hailey that the “liberal media machine” would drown out the voices of the two victims with TV talking heads chanting “innocent till proven guilty” over and over. They’d be whining about the so-called power of the state and making the same old claims that police trumped up murder charges and planted evidence. Maybe pundits would even take potshots at the pregnant victim. Nothing was sacred when TV ratings were at stake . . . Hailey had learned that the hard way.
What if one juror listened?
But Hailey knew the truth. Julie and her unborn baby girl were brutally murdered. Extremely faint markings on what was left of neck tissue arguably suggested ligature strangulation. But it was only that . . . arguable.
Cause of death was officially ruled “undetermined” by the Chatham Medical Examiner because by the time her body washed ashore off Savannah’s South Channel, Julie Love was mostly just a skeleton.
But as fate would have it, a portion of the thick, protective layer of her uterus remained intact long enough to largely protect her unborn baby. The tiny fetus that would have been baby Lily washed up on the same sandy shore with the very next Atlantic tide, looking almost exactly like a bright and shiny, plastic and naked, store-bought baby doll.
The sight of little Lily brought homicide investigators to tears, and the photos taken that day would likely have the same impact on a jury. Not only that, there was plastic twine tangled around Julie’s ankles, and the cement block that washed ashore was the same type block found in Todd Adams’s garage.
Not entirely damning, in light of the fact it was also the same type of cement block found at every Lowe’s or Home Depot you cared to stop at, four of them in metro-Savannah alone. The twine was explained away as having tangled onto Julie’s dead body after being set free from some unwitting fisherman’s boat.
Hailey heard about the story when the pregnant twenty-eight-year-old first went missing. Julie was home alone decorating the Christmas tree when she reportedly took her little King Charles Spaniel for a walk to a local park. Then, the nine months pregnant mom just “disappeared.”
Her husband said he’d gone fishing off the tip of Tybee Island and was away all day. Months and months of investigation ensued and, predictably, a string of Todd Adams’s affairs came to light. But the cops didn’t find it on their own.
The tabloids beat the cops to the punch by digging up the truth about Todd Adams and his multiple sleazy affairs. Mike Walker with Snoop magazine and the even more ubiquitous Snoop.com, racked up two million clicks in the first thirty-six hours after posting. Walker actually ended up doing a lot of the police’s legwork for them.
Walker’s salacious headlines instantly translated into millions of dollars of sales. Gorgeous shots of Julie as a high school cheerleader appeared out of nowhere, wedding photos, photos of her in the baby’s soon-to-be nursery, of Julie at Christmas parties and at home in front of the couple’s Christmas tree, her tummy announcing the imminent birth of baby Lily.
The night before Julie Love went missing, she attended a neighborhood Christmas party by herself, then decorated the family tree all alone. It was later revealed her husband went to a Christmas party of his own . . . with a bleached-blonde girlfriend poured into a tight, red satin strapless cocktail dress. To top it all off, Todd Adams had his
